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💬 The Wrap

Hello and welcome to emoji action season. Kicking off around World Emoji Day in mid-July, we tend to see emoji updates from major vendors just about every month.

Apple and Microsoft have both previewed their new emojis recently, and Google has just begun rolling out their major emoji update in Android 9.0 “Pie". Expect to see more from Facebook and Samsung later in the year, too.

On this month's podcast I chat to Judy Safran-Aasen and Mike LaJoie from the team who handle emoji at Microsoft, and we discuss a number of the articles mentioned in this very newsletter.

A lot of the articles this month are from news or announcements on World Emoji Day itself, but if you're looking for something quicker, here's video summary of the day.

The Ninja Cat emoji has been around on Windows since 2016, but as some people might not have seen it, here's a bump. These are ZWJ sequences that show the Ninja Cat (or Astro Cat, or Hacker Cat) on Windows, but on other platforms show the individual code points separately: a fairly graceful fallback.

I was at the New York premiere of Emojiland on World Emoji Day (sitting next to the author of this article, incidentally) and really enjoyed it. Great music, superb casting, and it was funny too. I talk to Quinn Rose about Emojiland on the latest Corner of the Sky episode which comes out this weekend.

This tumblr post did the rounds a while back, and keeps getting picked up. The whole tumblr-emoji-review is a format that continues to work well. Mostly due to the wide variety of designs to comment on.

One challenge with flags (not specifically referencing the trans flag here) is that there are so many. Flags for people of Kurdistan, Native American tribes, Indigenous Australians, and a whole host of other LGBT flags. This shouldn't be a case against a trans flag, but it certainly gets trickier when venturing further than ISO codes which are used for the majority of current flags.

I have to admit I didn't see the US military social media posts on World Emoji Day, but when I came across some of them afterward they did take me by, uh, surprise(?). Especially this Animoji post from the Department of Defense.

Coming to iOS "later this year" (my guess would be iOS 12.1 around October or iOS 12.2 around November - but that's just speculation) these previews of new Apple emojis were shared on World Emoji Day. Not every new emoji is shown, but quite a wide selection have been shared.

If you're not sick of hearing from me this month (I've been taking some time off, believe it or not), Pete Pachal and I recap what's been going on in the emoji world in the past 12 months on the latest episode of MashTalk.